Whither a Wondrous Love

I just got back from a blissful afternoon under the trees at Hale Farm and Village playing music for close to 5 hours with total strangers. I wasn't going to go as it had rained all morning but at around 12:30 the sun came out, I called a buddy of mine, and we met out in the old Western Reserve for a day of music.

While there he told me he'd heard about a shooting in Twinsburg. A police officer had been killed. I thought that was mighty strange. Nothing much ever happens here and if it does it's a big deal and yet somehow I missed it.

When I got home, I fixed myself a beautiful late supper of salmon with spinach salad with a glass of fume blanc wine. Then I opened the news. The officer, Josh Miktarian, 33 years old, was shot and killed right by the grocery store where I bought the food I'd eaten, a few hours after I left the store. He had pulled over a driver and his K-9 was in the car with him. Nearby residents heard yelling and then a shot rang out. And that was the end of Officer Miktarian, dad, husband, owner of a pizza joint, guitarist in a local rock band.

It's sad, certainly, and unnerving, and I'm pissed off, too. What the hell is going on in this world? The other day a guy in Cleveland was shot and killed while standing in his bedroom just as he was about to lay down and go to sleep. Well, the fella, a postal worker, is sleeping now for good.

Wondrous Love, performed in perfection the other night at The Kent Stage by the amazing Blue Highway, has kind of grabbed me over the last couple of days because it was a hymn from my childhood. It also is eerily appropriate now.

I had written earlier in a comment that when the guys got done with this, my jaw literally was hanging open, and it's true, it was. There was a lot of levity and a lot of fast-acting bluegrass up to that point, and usually at a bluegrass show the band will offer up a gospel tune or a quartet, and it's usually some standard off of one of their albums. This hymn tune, the title track of their gospel recording, Wondrous Love, was presented in layers, lead vocalist and bass player Wayne Taylor setting the stage with mando player and vocalist Shawn Lane. Tim Stafford came out next on the next verse, then the band's banjo player Jason Burleson, and finally Rob Ickes. (See the band's profiles here.) But it was so subtle you didn't really know what was happening, you just had this impact all of a sudden. And I've heard a lot of great singing over the years, but this was really exceptional singing. You could have heard a pin drop. I suspect a good many of the folks in the audience were holding their lower jaws. Hear the studio version here, or go back to yesterday's post and click on the link near the end when I mention about Sunday quiet time for a YouTube video.

The last time I heard this hymn, I was a little girl, probably not more than 10 years old. My mother used to take me to church with her in Dillonvale, Ohio, literally almost a one-stoplight town. We were Catholic, but somehow I never took this hymn for being like any of the others. And it's not, it comes from the shape-note tradition, and the words are anything but Anglo-Roman mass fare. But I always liked it, as a kid, because it was haunting and unusual. Now more than 30 years later I appreciate it much differently. But I had certainly forgotten all about it until Blue Highway performed it the other night. Suddenly I felt captured, exposed --oddly graced.

I leave you with this tune and hope that something of it resonates with you. I wish that we could believe in a wondrous love that would explain away the wasteful side of human nature, the power of shadow to take a life, ruin one's own life and so many others in the taking. My loss now is that innocence when I could turn to this song or so many others and just put my trust in it, in a higher love. Now, all I have is the hope that at some point humanity will right itself before self-destructing. How I miss the days of my innocent belief.